1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to commenting widgets, and more particularly, to location aware commenting widgets for social interaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the digital era, providing content and having interactions related to the presented content has taken on a whole new meaning. For instance, the content of an article is made available to all the users as soon as the article is “published” on the internet. The internet has established itself as an interactive medium wherein users are able to publish articles of interest, facilitate chat, create/participate in discussion groups and interactive blogs. In the highly competitive world of the internet, content providers who publish articles on their website are looking into ways to engage a user in order to increase the traffic to their website. One way the content providers try to keep the users engaged is by providing the users with tools to comment directly and discuss on stories/articles published on the content provider's website and postings to weblogs.
With the sheer number of articles/weblogs available on the internet and the number of people having access to the internet, some of the articles (i.e. head content) attract hundreds and even thousands of responses from users from all over the world. This is especially the case when the articles are related to breaking news that are of great significance to the users. The responses include comments, recommendations and/or ratings. A user is able to rate, recommend or respond to comments created by another user for an article or comment/recommend an article based on its content. When an article has thousands of responses from a plurality of users, it is very difficult and often impossible for a user to follow conversations or consume responses related to an article that the user really cares about. As more comments accumulate for the article, the user is exposed to a “junkyard” of comments for the article leading to user aggravation. A new user will most likely participate in an online conversation about a published article or in a weblog when the user is able to identify content from his/her own friends, when the user sees content from users from a geographical location that is of relevance to the user, if the conversation is about articles or topics the user is interested in or likes, or if the user's prior contributions to the particular article are recognized by the online community. Typically, the content providers present all the comments from all users and do not provide the ability to filter the comments to ones that are most relevant to the user.
It would be advantageous to have the ability to filter comments/responses to articles so as to be able to view only those comments that are relevant to the user. It would also be advantageous to have a way of viewing comments from other locations without hassle.
It is in this context that the embodiments of the invention arise.